Summary: <br> On June 10, 1865 – 154 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s magnificent music drama Tristan und Isolde received its premiere in Munich under the baton of Hans von Bülow (with whose wife, Cosima, Wagner was carrying on an affair). <br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://d3fr1q02b1tb0i.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/10104358/Joseph_Albert_-_Ludwig_und_Malwine_Schnorr_von_Carolsfeld_-_Tristan_und_Isolde_1865f.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld as Tristan and Isolde at the first performance of Tristan und Isolde on June 10, 1865<br> <br> <br> <br> (The parts of Tristan and Isolde were sung by the real-life husband and wife team of Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Having sung the role of Tristan four times, Ludwig dropped dead on July 21, 1865, prompting the rumor than the role of Tristan – one of the most difficult in the repertoire – had flat-out killed him. Malvina was so distraught that though she lived for another 38 years, she never sang again.) <br> <br> <br> <br> Tristan und Isolde is a three-act music drama, or what Wagner himself called “eine Handlung” (which means “a drama” or“an action”; by mid-career Wagner refused to use the word “opera”, claiming that it represented the debased pseudo-art of anyone not named “Wagner”.) Tristan und Isolde’s libretto (or “poem”, as Wagner would have us call it) was written and its music composed by Wagner between 1855 and 1859.<br> <br> <br> <br> Richard Wagner (1813–1883) in 1860<br> <br> <br> <br> Wagner based his “poem” on a twelfth-century romance entitled Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, who died circa 1210. Wagner’s poem tells the story of two presumed “enemies” – the Irish princess Isolde and the Cornish (southern English) knight Tristan – who fall madly in love when they are duped into drinking a love potion. (Many modern observers – yours truly included – believe that this “love potion” was nothing but a placebo, one that allowed Tristan and Isolde to, like, get in touch with their feelings. Unfortunately, their love for each other is illicit (Isolde is scheduled to marry the King of Cornwall) and unconsummated (despite their best efforts, T and I never manage to “do the dirty”, perhaps because they just can’t stop singing about how much they love each other). In the end, Tristan is cut down by a fellow knight of Cornwall and Isolde, on finding Tristan dying, expires over his now dead body in an orgasmic haze.<br> <br> <br> <br> Critics of Tristan und Isolde have referred to Wagner’s linked infatuation with sex and death as “perfumed obscenity” and its orgasmic and deathly conclusion as “snuff opera”. <br> <br> <br> <br> Those nattering nabobs of critical negativism aside, I would happily argue that Tristan und Isolde is Wagner’s single greatest work. There’s nothing else even remotely like it in the repertoire.<br> <br> <br> <br> Richard Wagner was a great composer. The magical beauty and dramatic power of his music, combined with the breathtaking grandiosity of his artistic vision together created a “Wagner cult”, one that began in his lifetime and lives on to this day. There are “Wagnerians” out there – Wagnerites, Wagnerfiles, and at its most extreme, Wagnerpaths – who will travel across the country to see a Wagner production, across continents and oceans to attend a Ring Cycle, who at least once in their lifetimes will make Hajj to the Wagnerian Mecca that is the Bavarian city of Bayreuth; Wagnerians whose knowledge of Wagner singers and recordings is outdone only by their opinions of same. <br> <br> <br> <br> There is no other composer in the great history of Western music who has inspired such quasi-religious adulation as Richard Wagner. Like Shakespeare before him and J. R. R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and George R.R. Martin after him,
